Adjustable self-healing methodology for accelerated functions in heterogeneous systems

Self-healing is a promising approach for designing reliable digital systems. It refers to the ability of a system to detect faults and automatically fixing them to avoid total failure. With the development of digital systems, heterogeneous systems, in which some parts of the system are executed on the programmable logic, and some other parts run on the processing elements (CPU), are becoming more prevalent. In this work, we propose an adjustable self-healing method that is applicable to heterogeneous systems with accelerated functions and enables the designers to add the self-healing feature to the design. In this method, by manipulating the software codes that are being executed on the processing element, we add the ability to verify the accelerated functions on the programmable logic and heal the possible failures to the system. This is done not only in a straightforward manner but also without being forced to choose a specific reliability-overhead point. The designer will have the option to select the optimum configuration for a desired reliability level. Experimental results on a large design including several accelerated functions are provided and show 42% improvement of reliability by having 27% overhead, as an example of the reliability-overhead point.